Monmouth College
Monmouth, Illinois
Instructions:
 | Hand in a thoughtful and thorough essay with perfect grammar and beautiful prose in answer to one of the following questions. Your essay should be no shorter than five pages--and that is five pages to the bottom of page five. This essay is due at the beginning of class on the date specified on the syllabus, Monday, 3 November 2008. |
| I encourage you to work with each other on this exam. Discuss the book among yourselves, and talk through your essays. |
| Do not plagiarize each other’s exams, however. If you do, both of you will be asked to rewrite your papers, and a penalty may be assessed. If you plagiarize from the book, you will also have to rewrite your paper, and a penalty may be assessed. |
| Direct quotes from the book must be inside quotation marks. The page number from whence the quote came must be noted in parenthesis after the period (that is, outside of the sentence, Chicago Manual Style, not MLA). The Scots Guide contains the College’s plagiarism policy, which I follow strictly. |
| Do not refer to Martin Luther King as Martin. You must write out everyone's name in full at first mention--and after you've done that (and identified them), you should use their last name to refer to them. King, then, is fine. |
| If you have any questions at all, call me, e-mail me, or stop by my office. I will be happy to look at a draft of your essay. I’ll be happy to look at your thesis statement, or your outline, or your opening paragraph--whatever will help you to write a really excellent essay. |
| This is a 50 point exam. |
| PLEASE label your essay with the number of the question you've chosen to answer. |
1. Read Marshall Frady 's Introduction and pay particular attention to his point on page 9 and 10 about the flaws of a hero. Write a thoughtful essay that considers Martin Luther King as a hero and a man. Was he more heroic or more human? And was this because of who he was essentially or who the movement (or America) needed him to be? Frady sees a symbiotic relationship between King's humanity and his heroism. In your essay, consider Frady's point of view, think about the questions above, and write with a deep, liberal arts understanding of King.
2. Journalist Marshall Frady wrote, "The fact is, King was always to fail more often than he would succeed. But throughout his confoundments...he yet remarkably seemed to keep growing--as if only magnified by his defeats...." (96) Consider this statement and write a thoughtful essay that analyzes Martin Luther King's life as a series of defeats and successes. At the end of his life, did the defeats outweigh the successes, or was it the other way around? Why?
3. This biography tells, in part, the story of the relationship between a man and a movement. Write a thoughtful essay that describes how Martin Luther King interacted with the people who were fighting essentially the same battles he was. Pay particular attention to the members of SNCC and to the men in King's inner circle. Note: this essay should not be a series of paragraphs describing the people around King and characterizing their relationship--I am not looking for a paragraph per person, in other words. I think you can be much more nuanced in your thinking and writing.
4. By now, all of you will have read a biography in ILA. You should all have discussed to a greater or lesser degree the field of biography--who writes them, why, who are the usual subjects for biographies, and so forth. One method of biography writers is to concentrate on the turning points in a life--those moments and events that cause someone's life to take a different direction, or to take on a new or deeper meaning. Write a thorough and thoughtful essay that analyzes the turning points in King's life. What were they? Why did Marshall Frady consider them important? How did these turning points lead to the civil rights leader described in Frady's biography?